Fears of a growing totalitarian tendency in the US have swelled during
2020–22. But how close are we really to a totalitarian state? How have
such regimes come about historically and what are the warning signs?
This article will answer these questions by examining totalitarian
regimes in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and the pattern by
which they came to power.
Every new order rises on the ruins of the old.
Those who would establish a new regime must tap into or generate
dissatisfaction with the status quo. However much those desiring a reset
may despise the old order, they can’t accomplish much without
harnessing or fabricating a similar attitude in the public. Then the
revolutionary totalitarian appears as the solution to these problems.
The Reign of Terror in Revolutionary France, for example, didn’t
begin with blood but with bread. Between 1715 and 1800, the population
of Europe doubled, creating food shortages among the French people. Many
of the French people resented the King’s growing centralized authority.
In addition, the ideas of the “Enlightenment” thinkers were stirring up
revolutionary feeling. Finally, the French government was massively in
debt due to the many wars of the eighteenth century, and it increased
taxation even on nobles.
It was these sufferings and fears, combined with the machinations of
the secret societies (admitted by the Marquis de Rosanbo at the Chamber
of Deputies session of July 1, 1904) that led the to the revolution and
the totalitarian Jacobin government. The Reign of Terror came after the
fall of the king and the Ancien Régime, which the revolutionaries
accomplished in part because of the problems and suffering in French
society prerevolution.
The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917—which established a
totalitarian regime so bloody that it would make the Reign of Terror
look like a mere red drop in the guillotine bucket—followed a similar
blueprint. The Bolshevik communists exploited the sufferings of the
Russian people for revolutionary purposes. What were these sufferings?
The Russian people had lost faith in Tsar Nicholas II and his
government, Russia contained restless ethnic minorities, and the poorly
equipped and led Russian armies were losing against the Germans in World
War I. Russia’s failures in the war led to demoralization and disrupted
the economy. In January 1917, transportation to cities like Petrograd
broke down, and this caused food and fuel shortages, and, eventually,
riots....<<<Read More>>>...
